Tag Archives: New York Times

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” and the View from Nowhere

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There was a moment in the second episode of The Newsroom where I really felt this series might pack a punch. Will McAvoy, the anchor of the evening news, is attending a brainstorming session led by his executive producer, MacKenzie, who rhetorically asks her assembled minions, “Are there really two sides to this story?” This wrinkles the fair brow of MacKenzie’s subordinate, Maggie, who asks, usefully, “What does that mean?” “The media’s biased towards fairness,” MacKenzie replies. To which Maggie rejoins, “How can you be biased toward fairness?”

You get the point: this is Aaron Sorkin’s world, after all. Clueless women exist so five-minute expositional monologues don’t have to. (Even if recitations of entire Wikipedia articles, delivered hostage-style directly into the camera, would arguably be more realistic and less condescending.) Unsurprisingly, Will – imagine a leaner, meaner Jed Bartlet with a penchant for swearing because he has a show on goddamn, motherfucking HBO – has something to say:

“Bias toward fairness means that if the entire Congressional Republican Caucus were to walk into the House and propose a resolution stating that the Earth was flat, the Times would lead with, ‘Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.’”

With that decisive and sardonic blurt, The Newsroom caught my full attention. Unfortunately, it lost me a couple seconds later, when Sorkin’s cutely clever dialogue once again devolved into petty pitter-patter and destroyed any chance at genuine social commentary. Nevertheless, Sorkin’s thinly disguised nod to what NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen has dubbed “The View from Nowhere” is worth further analysis.

In that fleeting moment, Will McAvoy’s brief diversion away from his Keith Olbermann-like self-absorption and into something a little more like media criticism got me fired up. I felt similarly while watching the premiere episode when, during a characteristically grating shouting match, MacKenzie demands of Will, “Where does it say that a good news show can’t be popular?” and he replies, “Nielsen ratings.” (As banal as these ideas may sound to anyone not living under a rock for the past few years, hearing them said aloud on a mainstream TV series was a little akin to reading Anderson Cooper’s coming-out email the other day: everyone knew it already, but it just hadn’t been said yet.) Perhaps this really was the series I’d been hoping The Newsroom would turn out to be when I’d first heard about it a couple months ago: a full-throated evisceration of fluff and reportorial false modesty disguised as “objective” news.

I really should’ve known better. To anyone who’s watched at least an episode or two of The West Wing, it is immediately clear that Sorkin desperately wants to believe in something. Problematically, he often explores this desire vicariously via nattily-attired male characters who passionately exchange juvenile tropes and platitudes, usually while striding briskly down a hallway, dodging Xerox machines and the occasional stray secretary. You can tell Sorkin feels a little sheepish about this boyish optimism, because – at least in The Newsroom, where a fleeting moment of cynicism occasionally breaks through his otherwise cloudy self-assurance – the character on the receiving end of the inspirational mini-speech often responds with just the sort of sarcastic aside Sorkin guesses a cynic might use.

But even this hedging of bets can’t dull the sharp edge off his innate bullishness on life: inevitably, the cynic is won over in the end – of the scene or the episode, never mind the season. I distinctly remember the final minutes of one episode of The West Wing (early in season two, I believe) in which most of the major characters are drinking beers on a brownstone stoop late into the evening. Josh Lyman is telling a story whose moral ultimately boils down to “America, Fuck Yeah,” and each of his enraptured listeners, speaking in solemn, hushed tones, responds in turn, “God bless America.” (“God bless America.” “God bless America.”) Ladies and gentlemen, Aaron Sorkin. So yes, while The Newsroom’s two main characters verbally bludgeon each other in the age-old fight between integrity and popularity, Sorkin long ago waved the white flag. Nielsen ratings, you see.

I bring this up because, providentially or otherwise, around the same time I first watched the pilot episode of The Newsroom, I’d also begun reading, at a friend’s recommendation, Neil Postman’s classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Caveat: I’m still only a third of the way through the book, but that’s far enough along to help me start mentally tying a common thread that weaves together a mélange of seemingly disparate entities from Sorkinist idealism to Jay Rosen’s “View from Nowhere” to Ricky Gervais’ TV show Extras to New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane’s confusion to, yes, Anderson Cooper’s sexuality.

Let’s start with Postman. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he distinguishes between what he dubs “television’s junk” on the one hand versus what self-serving journalists might call “serious television” on the other. “I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it,” he reassures us, but then warns, “Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.”

The question, then, is which category can most accurately lay claim to The Newsroom. I think I could venture an uneducated guess as to Postman’s take: whichever category doesn’t include the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for starters; whichever one does include TV shows about TV shows about the news, as a follow-up. Clearly, Sorkin and Postman wouldn’t see eye to eye on this (nor on anything else, most likely). On the one hand, Sorkin can easily be dismissed. No creator prefers to think of his invention as “television’s junk.”

On the other hand, a TV series that launches an honest attempt to take on the absurdities of its own medium warrants respect if executed correctly. I don’t watch a lot of television, but in terms of creating a legitimate space for introspection and self-reflection, it’s hard for me to come up with a better example than British comedian Ricky Gervais’ hit show Extras.

The first season, while hilarious, isn’t particularly notable on a deeper level, but it’s the second (and final) season that really turns the corner into a full-frontal assault on television entertainment. There must be no sweeter irony than pillorying BBC TV executives as slavish devotees of the almighty bottom line on a show financed and aired by that very same company. This was form making sweet, sweet love to content.

If, as Postman (himself paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan) postulates, “the medium is the metaphor,” then Gervais seemed to grasp this lesson perfectly. Season two is a six-episode marathon portraying the slow, tortuous disintegration of an aspiring artiste into a self-loathing puppet spouting catchphrases in a desperate, cloying attempt to placate his overlords and stave off the fast-approaching death of his TV celebrity. It’s a remarkably pathetic descent, rendered all the more so by the oddly moving spectacle of Gervais’ character clumsily pirouetting through increasingly incoherent rationalizations so as to shield himself from the reality of his self-annihilation.

And then, just like that, after twelve episodes and one Christmas special, Ricky Gervais and his brainchild, Extras, bowed out, almost assuredly leaving money on the table. Nothing more needed to be said. To do otherwise would have been to jeopardize the credibility of his critique and, paradoxically, would have turned his real-life series into a self-parody, life imitating art. No, then. Leave the sequels to pirates and superheroes.

It is against this mental backdrop of mine that Aaron Sorkin was unlucky enough to submit his latest entry. Reciting trite clichés in steady vocal crescendos makes for entertaining television. It may even make for great television. But great television – even the best thing on TV, Postman reminds us – is the junk. TV Sorkin-land occupies the world just a few ladder rungs above the tundra of laugh tracks and catchphrases, ambitious enough to fancy itself serious but oblivious beyond measure to its startling irrelevance. I can envision, sometime in 2020, a season nine where a thoroughly sincere Will McAvoy rails against the frivolous pursuit of Nielsen ratings and advertising dollars, and I can envision myself, years before, having thrown my remote control through the wall.

Even a show like Extras is probably not what Postman had in mind when he discussed the things “[a culture] claims as significant.” Indeed, his keen eye was trained on the news desk, the anchor’s chair, the endlessly scrolling ticker. This was then, and still is now, the domain of “Very Serious People” (to borrow Paul Krugman’s phrase). And yet television news today is dominated by uber-partisan hatchet men on the one side and self-described “neutral” journalists on the other. The former star in shows like CNN’s ill-fated Crossfire, while the latter’s considerable terror of accidentally importing facts into fully contrived controversies leads them to abandon the task altogether and question, instead, whether the presidential candidates prefer iPhones to BlackBerries.

This is exactly what Postman had feared in his worst dystopian nightmare. Invoking the dichotomously grim futures envisioned in 1984 and Brave New World, Postman wrote: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

By 1985, when Amusing Ourselves to Death was first published, Postman was convinced Huxley’s vision had carried the day. What he might not have anticipated at the time was the retrogressive effect TV news would exert even on its older counterparts. (Or maybe he did: again, I’m only one-third finished.) It’s no longer just CNN throwing out more election-night holograms while FOX and MSNBC exchange clumps of angry spittle. The disease has spread backwards, infecting the previously immune printed press.

Among its victims is none other than the Grey Lady herself, the New York Times. Its public editor, Arthur Brisbane, recently ignited an Internet firestorm with his sincerely-titled column, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” The online response was rapid, voluminous, and overwhelmingly of one mind: thankfully, virtually everyone was incredulous that the question even had to be asked. Brisbane’s query was a classic embodiment of Jay Rosen’s “View from Nowhere:” assuming, sans verification, that every story has two equally valid sides. As The Newsroom’s MacKenzie rightly noted, some stories have five sides. Some have one. But simply serving as the court stenographer, which was bad enough in the pre-Internet era, isn’t being fair anymore. It’s being lazy. Mostly, it’s being scared.

To the Times’ credit, Brisbane is its public editor, meaning he operates independently of all other staff. But a brief skimming of an average day’s news coverage makes it immediately obvious that the problem is widespread. To use one infamous example from relatively recent history, the paper’s longtime refusal to use the word “torture” to describe waterboarding spawned so much criticism that a satirical web app calling itself the “New York Times Torture Euphemism Generator” sprung up: one could refresh the page to yield various phrases like “enhanced physical audits” and “elevated nipple scrutiny.” Ironically, the Times’ then-public editor’s official explanation for its linguistic aversion to “torture” inadvertently reinforced its critics’ justified perception as to the paper’s insistence on perpetuating false equivalencies: “The Times is displeasing some who think ‘brutal’ is just a timid euphemism for torture and their opponents who think ‘brutal’ is too loaded.” (Because waterboarding isn’t brutal if it’s done fewer than 183 times per person. Look it up.)

It is perhaps more interesting to imagine Neil Postman’s take on the Internet as it exists today. As early as 1995, in an interview with Charlene Hunter Gault on PBS’ NewsHour, Postman expressed his alarm at the then-novel idea of an “information superhighway:” “I often wonder if this doesn’t signify the end of any meaningful community life.” (In a twist he could easily appreciate, this very interview stands today as a testament to a bygone era, one in which in-depth discussions of theoretical import could be shown on national TV and people would actually watch.) He conceded the interactive nature of the Internet, which contrasted it from the passivity of watching television, but feared – accurately – that it would nevertheless lead to a surge in tribalism (foreshadowing Cass Sunstein’s “information cocoons”) and actually divide the global community while claiming to unite it. De-contextualization – the commodification of information as a standalone product, utterly divorced from personal or even local significance – was a primary concern of Postman’s. And that’s where we jump to Anderson Cooper’s sexuality.

Anderson Cooper visited Wolfson Children's Hos...

As a preemptive disclaimer, I happen to like Cooper more than just about anyone else doing news on TV today. (Not counting Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who together represent a nearly perfect antidote to Postman’s disgust for trivialities masquerading as something culturally significant: Stewart and Colbert are cultural signifiers masquerading as triviality.) But this doesn’t alter the fact that the recent “news” of his homosexuality embodied the worst of everything about the entertainment conglomerate approach to TV news.

Cooper is, quite literally, a TV celebrity. He’s famous solely by virtue of his position as someone who appears regularly on TV. It’s notable to what extent that trajectory alone – from TV presence to fame, and not the other way around – so profoundly contrasts itself with the print press. How many people would recognize Bill Keller walking down the street? How about Jill Abramson? The medium of television made Anderson Cooper who he is, and so it is only fitting that his self-outing should light up the television and computer screens of people all over the world in return. That Anderson Cooper’s sexuality bears no personal significance for any of these people is completely missed in the rush to retell and re-tweet the “breaking news.”

This may look like a tempest in a teapot, except that human attention spans are finite containers. Spending time talking about Anderson Cooper’s sexuality necessarily detracts from the available time and mental effort required to understand something else that might have infinitely more personal relevance. Worse yet, it conditions us to start categorizing stories like these as “news.” Not only is information out of context now an acceptable subject of extended discussion, but the type of wonky dissection of media critiques that Postman had launched into with Gault in 1995 now seems strangely quaint, a relic of a simpler, more boring time. The financial troubles of many of our historical newspapers signal the emergence of a culture that’s moved on from the world of facts and figures and swept straight into a sea of colors and noise and lights. And tickers. Endlessly scrolling tickers.

Will McAvoy wasn’t wrong to locate the media’s failure in its inability to favor facts over a dubious balancing act that ignores the central issues. But Sorkin was wrong, for implicitly positioning The Newsroom as intellectually significant when, so far at least, it’s really nothing more than a very conventional sitcom. Nothing more than junk television. Which just might make it the best thing on TV.

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Obama 2012, brought to you by the New York Times

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The paper of record is really hitting its stride in its not-so-subtle Obama reelection campaigning. The latest:

“As a photographer, you know when you have a unique moment. But I didn’t realize the extent to which this one would take on a life of its own,” Mr. Souza said. “That one became an instant favorite of the staff. I think people are struck by the fact that the president of the United States was willing to bend down and let a little boy feel his head.”

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime adviser, has a copy framed in his Chicago office. He said of Jacob, “Really, what he was saying is, ‘Gee, you’re just like me.’ And it doesn’t take a big leap to think that child could be thinking, ‘Maybe I could be here someday.’ This can be such a cynical business, and then there are moments like that that just remind you that it’s worth it.”

A copy of the photo hangs in the Philadelphia family’s living room with several others taken that day. Mr. Philadelphia, now in Afghanistan for the State Department, said: “It’s important for black children to see a black man as president. You can believe that any position is possible to achieve if you see a black person in it.”

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The Republican reaction to Obama on same-sex marriage

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Yesterday, I was rendered nearly speechless (nearly; come on, you didn’t really expect actual speechlessness from me, did you?) with pleasure at President Obama’s long-awaited and extremely tardy announcement of the end of his “evolution” on same-sex marriage. (Granted, this was a completely manufactured and artificial “evolution,” since he supported gay marriage as long ago as 1996 and only changed it when he became more politically prominent — but an “evolution” nonetheless, in the same Orwellian tradition of linguistic manipulation that helped make such ludicrous things possible as “enhanced interrogation techniques” being something other than torture. OK, I’m getting way off on a tangent now. Back to Planet Earth.)

Anyway, the point is that I was extremely happy — giddy, even — over the President’s remarks. But what makes me almost happier, in a less viscerally affecting way but in a calmer and more long-term perspective, is the virtual absence of strong public opposition to this. It’s incredible how muted the response has been. It really is hard to believe how far the country has moved on this in recent years. In 2004, President Bush was campaigning on his support of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage nationally. Eight years later, a sitting President just announced his support for same-sex marriage, and Republicans don’t even dare to mount a serious rebuttal. This lack of a response is, to me, even more newsworthy than the announcement itself. As the New York Times noted:

Conservative social activists and groups that oppose same-sex marriage have been vocal in their disdain for Mr. Obama’s announcement. And advisers to Mr. Romney said in television interviews on Thursday that he would campaign on the issue of his opposition to same-sex marriage.

“Sure. I think it’s an important issue for people and it engenders strong feelings on both sides,” Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, said on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown.” “I think it’s important to be respectful in how we talk about our differences, but the fact is that’s a significant difference in November.”

But Republican officials on Capitol Hill seemed eager to shift the conversation away from the social issue and back to blaming the nation’s economic struggles on Mr. Obama’s policies.

The House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, repeatedly deflected questions about Mr. Obama’s new position on same-sex marriage at his weekly news conference. He said he believed that marriage should be limited to “one man and one woman” and then quickly flicked back to the economy.

This is notable. Same-sex marriage has, quite suddenly, become a topic that Republicans are gradually realizing they don’t want to be seen publicly and vigorously opposing. They’d rather talk about just about anything else. And that is a good sign.

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The New York Times: socioeconomically tone-deaf as ever

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From today’s “Opinionator” with Gail Collins and David Brooks:

David:  I once conducted an interview with a businessman in a small town and I pulled up in my Audi A6, which was a very nice car but not super luxury.

Sir David Brooks is wrong about the “not super luxury” part. The 2012 Audi A6 is, in fact, currently ranked #2 by U.S. News & World Report in the “Luxury Large Cars” category and retails, on average, between $41,245 and $49,346. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household — not individual — income (averaged over the period 2006-2010) was $51,914. So an Audi A6 costs somewhere between 79% and 95% of the average American household’s pre-tax income.

Look, I am not one of those people who decry rich people for being rich. Hell, I don’t have a problem with rich presidents, politicians, or candidates. In some cases it may even reduce corruption by limiting the political sway of outside contributions. But New York Times writers really need to stop playing the “seriously, we’re not rich” game that has been increasingly played by the American upper class (including, too often, by writers for the Times). It’s absolutely fine to be wealthy. It’s not fine to pretend to be a member of a more modest social class.

And…that makes everyone

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Today, the New York Times reports that Israel’s former Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, has now added his voice to the chorus of people (largely in the intelligence community) who believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s drumbeat of war with Iran is reckless and stupid:

“I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” said Yuval Diskin, who stepped down last May after six years running the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the F.B.I.

“I have observed them from up close,” Mr. Diskin said. “I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.” Echoing Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, Mr. Diskin also said that the government was “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Funny thing about the intelligence community: they’re not elected, so they don’t make their living scaring the bejeezus out of people to keep their jobs. Can we all please take stock of the situation, rationally, and come to the obvious conclusion that Bibi is a demagogic nut job whose overheated rhetoric is destabilizing to the entire region? There is an almost complete transatlantic consensus that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a very good idea. But why listen to nuclear experts and intelligence chiefs when you can so easily make completely inaccurate analogies comparing today’s situation to the Holocaust?

The Obama administration warns Israel via a media proxy?

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More interesting developments in the whole will-they-or-won’t-they saga, a romantic comedy starring Israel, bunker-busters, and Iranian nuclear sites. Or as the Greeks might argue, more of a tragedy, really. I suppose this debate is moot until we find out what happens in the end.

And speaking of endgames, I am (slightly, incrementally) heartened by the noises emanating from the American camp. Yesterday, an article appeared on the New York Times web site titled, “U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.” The article begins thusly:

Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

This is strikingly different rhetoric than we’ve been hearing in most quarters recently regarding Iran. My take is that the Obama White House is preemptively trying to distance itself from any decision Israel may take on its own. A similar story took place several days earlier, when American General Martin Dempsey told Fareed Zakaria in an interview that an Israeli strike against Iran would not be “prudent.” This interview aired on the very same day that the Telegraph reported similar comments from British foreign secretary William Hague: an Israeli attack “would not be wise,” he said.

The subtext in the similarity of both the language and the timing of the two interviews was unmistakable: the U.S. and Great Britain are clearly acting in concert to warn the Israeli government, led by the fairly maniacal Benjamin Netanyahu, that they should not expect much support from either the U.S. or the U.K. in planning to attack Iran.

I believe, however, that this latest salvo — fired via the New York Times — is not only a stronger statement than the earlier ones, but may actually be indicative of a point of no return for the United States’ position on Iran. If Israel were to attack Iran, it would be very difficult for the Obama administration to rationally justify supporting or becoming involved in Israel’s military venture, since its own American security and intelligence agencies are making it very clear that they don’t believe the Iranian threat to be as serious as it is often described. I would imagine that Netanyahu is cognizant of this meaning, and I’m betting he’s seething right now. Could we actually be witnessing a 1956 Suez Canal moment, and during an American presidential election year no less?

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Press organizations protest police treatment

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A few months ago I noted (in a somewhat hyperbolic tone, or so I thought at the time) that the methods used by London authorities to quell the summer riots were heavy-handed and oddly reminiscent of practices more often associated with ne’er-do-well authoritarian dictatorships in the Middle East.

Well, things have only gotten weirder since then. The Occupy Wall Street movement — which, in my judgment, would likely have been ignored long ago if not for senseless police brutality — really picked up steam this past week, when a campus police officer at UC Davis pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters. (Try saying that five times fast.) The school’s chancellor, who was initially somewhat defiant, has since apologized.

And yet perhaps the more notable form of anti-police brutality backlash came in the form of this New York Times post, which stated, “A cross-section of 13 news organizations in New York City lodged complaints on Monday about the New York Police Department’s treatment of journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street movement.”

What I found particularly disturbing about the UC Davis incident, apart from the obvious insanity of the event itself, was the extraordinarily calm and collected manner in which the officer sprayed the students. There were cameras everywhere; he had to have seen them. A police force that can act with such impunity, metaphorically taunting the cameras with its nonchalance, is not fit to “protect” a populace. Coming less than one month after a strange scene in the Bronx in which hundreds of off-duty cops angrily protested their colleagues’ apparently justified indictments for ticket-fixing, one increasingly gets the impression that police departments around the country are collectively in need of a major overhaul. (In that Bronx story, the police even went so far as to taunt welfare recipients, and some wore t-shirts that read, “Improving everyone’s quality of life but our own.”)

I would like to suggest that this start a national conversation about police tactics, but genuine national conversation doesn’t seem to be much in vogue these days.

UPDATE (11/23/2011 1:42 AM Paris time): Well, that certainly didn’t take long. One Times reporter fires a warning shot.

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Maybe it’s just me…

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…but the New York Times appears to be missing the point entirely:

Occupy Wall Street protesters have touched a nerve with their slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” It has focused attention on the ground gained by the rich even as a brutal economy has pushed the typical American family backward. Economic inequality may or may not become a central issue in the presidential race, but the candidates have at least one reason to hope it does not.

A look at the finances of those vying for the presidency shows that almost all of them rank at the very top of the country’s earners. In other words, they are the 1 percent.

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Just an observation

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From the New York Times today:

The BBC and other British news organizations reported Tuesday that the police may be permitted to use rubber bullets for the first time as part of the government’s strengthened response to any resumption of the mayhem. David Lammy, Britain’s intellectual-property minister, also called for a suspension of Blackberry’s encrypted instant message service. Many rioters, exploiting that service, had been able to organize mobs and outmaneuver the police, who were ill-equipped to monitor it. [emphasis mine] “It is unfortunate, but for the very short term, London can’t have a night like the last,” Mr. Lammy said in a Twitter post.

This sounds awfully familiar. It is also, as Andrew Sullivan would likely dub it, Greenwald bait.

It goes without saying that most aspects of the London riots are entirely different than those that have been taking place all over the Middle East this year. Nevertheless, it is sometimes helpful to remind ourselves what exactly separates “us” from “them,” as a preemptive guard against a gradual erosion of civil liberties. We’ve learned that lesson the hard way in the United States since 9/11 — and perhaps more depressingly, many have yet to grasp it.

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On Glenn Greenwald, Israel, and The Godfather III

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Over the last several days, I’ve been commenting on the blog Sad Red Earth, run by A. Jay Adler. The post, guest-written by Rob H., that sparked the extensive comments was titled “Glenn Greenwald’s False Accusation Against The New York Times.” In it, Rob accused Glenn Greenwald, a political blogger on Salon.com, of falsely attributing anti-Muslim bias to the New York Times, which ran a headline immediately after the recent Oslo attacks stating, “Powerful Explosions Hit Oslo; Jihadis Claim Responsibility.”

Greenwald wrote that “for much of the day…the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo.” In reality, Rob countered, “the truth turned out to be that the headline he sharply criticized in two columns — over two days — was only online for about two hours, and NOT ‘much of the day.’ I confirmed this with a Senior Editor at The Times by simply sending him an email inquiring about the headline in question.”

First of all, assuming Rob is telling the truth (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), one should give credit where credit is due. Rob was right, and Greenwald was wrong. In fact, not only was he wrong, but his misinformation looks a bit suspicious: it’s difficult to mistake two hours for most of a day without some pretty severe preconceived biases.

The comments section of Rob’s post soon spun off into a million different directions, however, only some of which were related to the original subject. In general, the comments either supported or rebutted one of the following topics:

1) Glenn Greenwald “often makes mistakes and even admits it while declaring he’ll make many more.” He is thus irresponsible and unreliable as a writer/thinker, and is guilty of committing the same journalistic crimes as those he so often pillories.

2) Greenwald’s “worse [sic] trait is that, in Chomsky style, he truly sees the U.S. as nothing but a force of evil in the world, an [sic] also has this nasty little habit of advancing explicitly anti-Semitic arguments.”

3) As A. Jay put it, “Which is it – you want something ‘out of’ our relationship with Israel that you think we don’t get, or you morally can’t ‘stomach’ Israel? You can’t stomach Syria either, but at least you’re not paying for the upset, and that’s bottom line? And there are not other bases upon which to distinguish between then two and upon which to base our relations with them?”

4) The Godfather III. Don’t ask; I’ll explain later on in this post.

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